What is China doing in Congo?
China said it fully supports Congo's approach to the activities of Chinese companies. This is why, in Giuseppe Gagliano's analysis
In recent weeks Wu Peng, director for Africa of the Beijing Foreign Ministry, has tried to let as many people know as possible that he fully supports the decisions made by the government of the Republic of Congo regarding Chinese companies, even when in business.
In mid-September he told the media and on his social networks that Xi Jinping's regime supported the decision in Kinshasa, which recently ordered six Chinese companies to stop their illegal activities in the Mwenga mines in South Kivu. Wu Peng added that the authorities of the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu also investigated these companies and came to demand that they leave the eastern province of the DRC and stop all clandestine operations as soon as possible. .
If the African official in Beijing felt compelled to talk about a case involving small gold mining sites, it is because the controversy over the illegal presence of these six Chinese companies went viral in August. Local and international media, social networks, civil society and the Congolese political class had taken up the topic.
Communication for transparency is becoming increasingly important.
Wu Peng, however, is not the only Chinese official to have recently condemned the actions of his compatriots in the mines of the Congo. Representatives therefore had to disassociate themselves from videos widely circulated on the network of Chinese workers violating the rights of Congolese in mining sites.
On their Twitter accounts, the Chinese embassy in the DRC and its boss, Zhu Jing, meanwhile, multiply comments on Beijing's desire to have a win-win cooperation with Kinshasa in the Congolese mining sector. On the same social network, the Sicomines page (Sino-Congolaise des mines) – a joint venture that associates Gécamines (32% of the shares) with the Chinese companies Sinohydro, China Railway Group, Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt Co and China Machinery Engineering Corp (68%) – has been much more active since June and supports compliance with the laws of the DRC and the development of local communities.
This insistence on the virtues of the China-DRC partnership, but also on legality and local content, issues on which up to now Beijing officials have spoken little, comes at the same time as a reversal of the strategy of the Congolese authorities. While President Joseph Kabila was very close to China, gradually letting his companies become the first mining investors in the DRC, his successor since 2019, Félix Tshisekedi, is more skeptical about his country's relations with Beijing, trying to rebalance them. Last May he even expressed the desire to renegotiate the contracts between the DRC and Beijing, according to him too much in favor of China, targeting in particular that of Sicomines.
Félix Tshisekedi also approached the United States, which is in the cold war with China, as part of these talks. Feeling threatened in its mining interests in the DRC far beyond the criticisms made by civil society for several years, China appears to be trying to change its practices, at least in terms of communication. The DRC is essential to the country's supply of strategic minerals for years to come.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/cina-congo-interessi/ on Tue, 28 Sep 2021 06:44:28 +0000.